Weekly Assessments 50%

Weekly assessments constitute 50% of your final grade, and are designed to keep you engaged with the readings, practicing technical skills, and connecting weekly work to your semester project.

At a Glance

Weekly assessment categories
Component Weight What You Do
Weekly Participation 25% Complete assigned readings and short annotations before class. During class, contribute to discussions, participate in group labs, post in the Zoom chat, and offer peer support.
Weekly Coding Assignments 25% Work through technical lessons, submit coding practice on GitHub, and adapt the work when possible to your own interests or project.

Weekly Rhythm

%%{init: {"themeVariables": {"fontSize": "20px"}, "flowchart": {"nodeSpacing": 55, "rankSpacing": 60}} }%%
flowchart TD
  A[Before Tuesday:<br/>read and explore assigned materials] --> B[Tuesday:<br/>discuss readings and cultural data examples]
  B --> C[Before Thursday:<br/>work through the technical lesson]
  C --> D[Thursday:<br/>review, troubleshoot, and work in breakout groups]
  D --> E[GitHub:<br/>submit coding assignments and project updates]
  E -. begin next week .-> A

Weekly Participation (25%)

Weekly participation includes both individual engagement with course materials and collaborative work with your peers. This combination ensures you are both deepening your own understanding and learning from others when working with culture as data.

Before each class, you are expected to engage with assigned materials, ranging from reading a book chapter or article, to exploring a data visualization, to reading documentation or working through a technical lesson. These materials lay the groundwork for our class discussions, our technical work, and your semester-long project. There may be some weeks that are of more interest to you, and I encourage you to explore the additional listed materials, though these are optional.

How to get participation credit?

One way to demonstrate your engagement with the weekly materials is to participate in our weekly seminar discussions. Your contributions could be in the form of questions about complex or confusing concepts in the readings, connections that you want to share across the assigned materials, or feedback and responses to peer contributions. More than simply talking as much as possible, though, our goal with seminar discussions is to create a thoughtful and respectful intellectual community.

Another way to demonstrate engagement is through asynchronous annotations. We will be using the Hypothesis annotation platform, with an introductory session in the first week of class. These annotations are a space for you to share your thoughts on the week’s materials and engage with your peers, and you may occasionally be asked to expand on your annotations during our discussions. You can sign up for Hypothesis at hypothes.is/signup and our course group link is available on Canvas. You will need to install the Hypothesis Browser Extension for your preferred browser as well. More instructions will be covered in class and are available in this lesson.

Participation also includes demonstrating technical work. Asking questions, showing your code, explaining a bug, helping a peer troubleshoot, or contributing to group work during in-class homework time all count as meaningful participation.

Grading Policy

For each class meeting, participation is graded on a simple 0–2 scale:

Participation score guide
Score Requirement What It Means
2 Prepared + contributed You prepared for the day’s work and helped the class think, troubleshoot, or collaborate during the session.
1 Prepared or contributed You prepared for class, or you contributed during class, but not both.
0 No visible participation There is no clear evidence of preparation or contribution, you simply attended class.

Prepared means you came ready for the day’s work.

For days with assigned readings, preparation means completing the short Hypothesis reading check before class. You might highlight a passage you think matters to the section topic and explain why, or you might ask a question about a confusing concept, or you might make a connection to another reading or topic we have covered.

Annotations are graded for completion and basic relevance, not polish. To receive credit, annotations must demonstrate thoughtful engagement with the material. Empty, generic, unrelated, or clearly disconnected annotations will not count. You may also be asked to explain your annotations in class.

Questions to consider when engaging with the weekly materials include:

  • What is the main argument of this piece? Is there an argument? What is interesting or evocative or infuriating?
  • If there is an argument, how does the author support the argument? What sorts of evidence or data did they utilize? How did they organize the structure of their piece?
  • If you did not feel there was an argument, what do you think was the author’s purpose or goal with the material, whether a project, blog post, tool, documentation, or dataset?
  • What is the likely audience for the material?
  • What connections or tensions did you identify across materials?
  • What did you not understand in the materials? What was confusing?
  • How would you connect the week’s materials to previous ones?

Overall, remember the goal is not to highlight everything the author or creator says, but instead to use the annotations as a way of showing your engagement and thinking about the material.

For more technical lessons, preparation means reading or trying the assigned technical lesson before class. You may also use Hypothesis on technical lessons to flag questions, bugs, confusing steps, or places where the lesson connects to your project. Technical annotations should help us troubleshoot together; they do not need to be annotated like published materials.

Contributed means you helped the class think, troubleshoot, or collaborate during the session. Contributions can happen in several ways:

  • Speaking during seminar discussion.
  • Adding a substantive question, comment, link, or example in Zoom chat.
  • Responding to a classmate’s point.
  • Helping your group make sense of a reading, dataset, or activity.
  • Contributing visibly to a group lab or brief synthesis activity.
  • Asking a question during Thursday technical review.
  • Demoing your code, bug, output, or workflow during class.
  • Helping a peer troubleshoot during in-class homework or project work time.
  • Sharing a useful connection to your project or another course example.

Strong participation can look different for different students. Speaking in seminar is one valuable form of participation, but it is not the only way to contribute.

For weekly participation, you must both be present in class and be an active participant in the discussion or activities to receive full credit. Simply attending class is not enough; you are expected to contribute thoughtfully to discussions and engage with the material and your peers.

For weekly annotations, you need to submit these via Hypothesis by midnight the day before class. This ensures that your contributions are available for others to review and discuss during our seminar. Your annotations should be tagged appropriately in our Hypothesis group to facilitate organization and discussion.

Participation examples
Example Score Why
On Tuesday, you add two specific Hypothesis annotations before class and make one relevant comment in discussion or chat. 2 You showed preparation and contributed during class.
On Tuesday, you add two specific Hypothesis annotations but do not participate during class. 1 You showed preparation, but there is no visible class contribution.
On Thursday, you try the technical lesson before class, add a Hypothesis question on a confusing step, and ask about it during review. 2 You showed preparation and contributed to technical discussion.
On Thursday, you do not try the technical lesson beforehand, but you help a peer troubleshoot during work time. 1 You contributed, but there is no visible preparation trace.
You attend class but do not complete annotations, speak, use chat, ask questions, demo code, or contribute visibly to group work. 0 Attendance alone is not participation credit.
You post generic annotations such as “interesting” or AI-style summaries that do not connect to a passage or question. 0 or 1 These may not count as preparation if they do not show specific engagement.

Group Labs and Collaboration

Groups will be assigned within the first two weeks of class after an initial survey of student interests and backgrounds. This group will work together to complete active in-class activities and occasional out-of-class assignments, which will be documented and submitted via GitHub, as well as collaborate on the semester-long project.

On group lab days, your lab work counts as the contributed part of participation. To receive full participation credit for the day, you still need both preparation and a visible contribution to the group lab, live discussion, or Zoom chat.

Major group assignments will be linked from the weekly schedule when they are assigned.

Structure and Expectations

  • Weekly prompts and activities: Each week, your group may be assigned a prompt or task that builds on the week’s materials. This could involve finding digital objects, exploring datasets, testing a tool, or applying a concept from the readings.
  • In-class synthesis: Some weeks, your group will briefly present your findings to the class. Not every group will present every week, but even when your group is not presenting, you are still expected to submit your work to GitHub and be prepared to discuss it if called upon. Presentations should be clear, concise, and demonstrate your group’s understanding and application of the week’s materials.
  • Documentation and submission: All group work, whether presented in class or not, must be documented and submitted to your group’s GitHub repository. This documentation should include a summary of your group’s activities, details on how the labor was divided, and any relevant reflections on the process. Clear and detailed documentation is crucial for both grading and for your group’s progress on the semester-long project.

Grading Policy

Your grade for weekly group work will be based on your active participation in presentations, the quality of your contributions, and the effectiveness of your collaboration. This includes both in-class activities and the quality of the work submitted on GitHub. This grade will not be impacted if a member of your group is absent or does not participate, though the group will be required to pivot their schedule and plan in that event.

Weekly group work must be submitted to GitHub by midnight prior to the class when it is due. This ensures that the work is available for review and that all group members are accountable for their contributions. Late submissions will receive half credit, as long as they are accompanied by an explanation for the delay. Repeated late submissions will result in the group meeting with the Instructor.

Weekly Coding Assignments (25%)

You will also have weekly programming assignments to complete and share via GitHub, unless indicated otherwise. Most coders work collaboratively, often engaging in pair programming, a method of talking through code problems together. This course encourages you to pair program and work together to learn from each other’s solutions. However, be aware that copying and pasting code might get you through one week, but the concepts in this course move quickly and build upon each other. So, I would encourage you to do your best to not only complete the assignments each week, but to make sure you understand the core concepts. Questions are encouraged during class, in Zoom chat, and on Slack, and we will discuss more about coding practices during our first week.

Generally, the weekly coding assignments will be on Thursdays, and will follow this rhythm:

  • Before Thursday, read or work through the coding lesson and complete any coding assignments.
  • In class, we will review the homework, as well as key concepts from the lesson and troubleshoot together.
  • During in-class work time, you will practice, ask questions, and work on the following week’s homework or your project.

In regards of AI usage for coding assignments, see our AI policy in the policies page and our GitHub Style Guide for the ai-chat-log.md expectations.

Grading Policy

Weekly coding assignments are graded on a simple 0–2 scale:

Weekly coding assignment score guide
Score Requirement What It Means
2 Complete assignment You submitted the required files through GitHub, made a serious attempt at the technical task, and included enough evidence to show what you did and what you understand.
1 Partial completion You submitted something relevant, but it is incomplete, missing required pieces, not pushed clearly to GitHub, or does not yet show enough evidence of your process.
0 Missing or insufficient assignment You did not submit the assignment, or the submission is too disconnected from the assignment to count.

Weekly coding assignments must be submitted via GitHub by midnight prior to the class meeting when they are due. These assignments are an opportunity to practice and solidify your understanding of the concepts covered each week. Late submissions will be accepted but will only receive partial credit, as long as they are turned in before the final class meeting. Pair programming is encouraged, but remember that understanding the underlying concepts is crucial as the material builds progressively throughout the semester.